Column: Finding Hope in a Coffeeshop
By Samantha Parson
Samantha Parson
Five years ago I decided that I was going to change my life. I was a 25-year-old who had dropped out of Penn State one semester away from graduating and spent the years after devolving into a deeply depressed, obese alcoholic who worked shitty jobs and lived with my parents in my hometown.
I had always dreamed of traveling the world but had never been on a plane or West of the rural Amish country of Pennsylvania where I grew up. But I was going to escape this hell I had created for myself. *I* was moving to Alaska.
I accepted a seasonal job as Lead Photographer for a glacier/wildlife tour boat company in Kenai Fjords National Park. It was my dream job, and it was going to fix everything. Something I didn't realize, though, is that life won't magically fix itself by moving 4.6k miles away to a remote town in Alaska without a car. *Especially* if you have a drinking problem, because I don't know if you guys know this but, Alaska *lovesss* to drink!
One rare sunny day off work, I stepped outside to find my coworker Kyle with a backpacking bag on looking ready for an adventure. He was going to hitchhike a few hours away to a whitewater rafting festival - and since I spent most of my days drinking rather than exploring Alaska, hitchhiking sounded like a grand chance for adventure. I quickly grabbed a bag full of the essentials - a box of Franzia wine and a water bottle to pour the wine into. Thats it. Nothing else.
Hours later, after hitching rides with many wild Alaskan characters, we arrive at our destination: a dusty, end-of-the-road but charming backwoods town with one gravel street, one restaurant/bar, and a population of 100.
At the end of that road was The Turnagain Arm, a body of water that completely disappears at low tide, revealing endless miles of mudflats fabled for acting as quicksand, having taken the lives of many over the years trapped as 10-ft tall tidal waves from The Gulf of Alaska come crashing back in. But these were just Urban Legends, we thought, and as Luck would have it - it was low tide when we arrived.
Drunk on my boxed backpack wine, the haunting beauty of the mudflats beckoned us. We seemed to walk forever until I took a step and suddenly sank up to my calves in mud. The more I moved, the more I sank. Soon I was submerged up to my mid-thighs! Being drunk really cuts out the fear and danger of being trapped in quicksand though, so my friend and I had a good laugh, he took a photo of me struggling, but eventually, I was free!!
Mudflats 1, Samantha 0. Ah, but where to find a pair of pants in a town of 100 people?
I was fine, but what wasn't fine - were my pants. They had been absolutely destroyed by the quickly hardening mud. Since I had only packed a box of wine in my bag and not a change of clothes like a normal person, I quickly realized - as a hitchhiker who would need a ride home - that it was essential I somehow find a new pair of pants. But seeing as this town didn't even have a gas station, let alone a clothes store - I had to get creative.
Lots of folks were camping for the Whitewater Rafting festival, so I decided I'd go around to each campsite and try to barter the only thing I had - my box of wine - for a new pair of pants. After 20 failed attempts, I finally found someone who had pants. *But...* their campsite was far away. If I *really* wanted the pants, and I did - I had to hop in a truck with sketchy strangers, alone, and be taken to a second secluded location with a dead cell phone taken by the quicksand.
Hello, World!
Since I had first filled my water bottle with wine before bartering it like the true alcoholic business woman I was, I was quite drunk and this all seemed like a great idea. For hours I was trapped at this campsite with what I soon learned were my new meth-smoking friends.
But eventually, I arrived back in town, alive, and with a brand-new (to me) dirty pair of pajama pants just in time for the bar to be open for business. I found my friend and began to drink my harrowing experience away.
I went out for a smoke break and fell asleep on the stairs outside the bar. When I woke from my slumber, I tried to get back inside and learned that I was *BANNED*!!
Me, banned?!
Ridiculous!
I had never been banned from a bar in all my years of excessive drinking. When I asked why, the bouncer said "Because you were literally passed out.. right there" But I somehow talked my way back in to "find my friend", ordered 5 more drinks, and blacked out until the next day. Where we found rides home and I learned I was *incredibly* late for work and in some big trouble.
My drinking and partying didn't end in Alaska though, it haunted me and grew stronger over the years as I continued to work seasonal jobs in National Parks - Zion, Acadia, Yellowstone. I was simply floating around life, barely existing or experiencing the beauty that surrounded me. I had lost all Hope that I'd ever become the person I once saw myself as, when dreaming of who I'd be when I grew up. I was told by doctors many times that I should be dead, but Luck always saved me.. for a reason I was unsure of.
And it was luck, or chance, or serendipity, that I once again encountered this past summer that brought my life full-circle.
My coworker and I were preparing to begin teaching a children's summer camp at Brimstone Boulders when we learned that the building had no power due to a car accident in town the night before. Since our beloved coffee machine was out of commission, we decided to walk to Dog River, which admittedly, is a Coffeeshop I had not been in before.
When I walk in, my jaw drops, and I stop in my tracks. There - on the wall, on a massive canvas - is a photo of that small 100-person, dusty one-road Alaskan town, the only bar I've ever been banned from, and the mudflats I sank in looming in the background.
What were the odds that due to a random car accident and a power outage on one of the 2 mornings a week I taught classes, that the monthly rotating artist series would align to feature this photo that held so much significance in my life?!
It had always been my dream to move to Oregon, and I moved here alone on March 25th, 2020 right as the pandemic first began. I was 4 months sober for the first time in my life. The job I moved here for shut down as the world did. I knew no one, and I was unsure I'd make it through. But there I was, standing in that random Coffeeshop, almost 2 years sober with a changed life in every single way - staring at a photo that perfectly represented all I've overcome to be living the life I am today.
I began crying as soon as I saw it.
I knew that it was more than luck or chance that brought me there that day, it was fate.
I bought the photo, and it now hangs in my room as a reminder of where I've come from. But the best part of this story is the name of that dusty little one-road Alaskan town - Hope.
Serendipity, fate, Hope.
Support Local News
Available to Everyone; Funded by Readers.
